The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  But then I might get out of bed to go to the toilet, and suddenly we were two people without hope of ever understanding each other.

  “I'm frightened of you. You make me afraid.” We were so in love that he was tender and happy, even as he said these things. “You want me to think you’re so terribly hard and cynical. But I know—you like to be touched, don’t you.”

  “Maybe . . . By you . . .”

  “You never smile.” We kissed. “But your eyes are more kind than any I’ve ever seen.”

  I was glad I scared him. It made me feel less afraid.

  Sometimes when I closed my eyes I saw a kind of shrunken, demonic but still beautiful if very white rendering of his face. Waking in the morning, I was launched into the universe where he was. Going to sleep, I passed into the dreamland he inhabited. The beginning and the end was in every word he spoke. I would look into his eyes sometimes and see my mother and father making love.

  I don’t know, I don’t know . . .

  “You have beautiful breasts.”

  “They’re small.”

  “Your breasts are perfect, beautiful, perfect.”

  “No, they’re too small.”

  “I refuse to believe that. To me they're perfect.”

  “But to everyone else, you mean, they’re too small.”

  “Whatever size they are, I love them.”

  “You mean you think they’re too small!” And I broke down weeping . . .

  I can’t remember what we promised one another during that long, fitful evening interrupted by a handful of daytimes; I can’t remember what we said, what we dreamed, what we witnessed, who we thought we were . . . But I remember with what passionate conviction I cherished the belief that I would never forget . . .

  "You’re a romantic. Are you a romantic?”

  “Maybe. I surprise myself.”

  “You have a wife.”

  Now why did I say that?

  “And two children,” he said.

  THE PART for the car didn’t come and didn’t come. Nearly a week went by. We didn’t mind.

  One day as we were done making love, the sheet held a rusty stain in the shape of a tulip.

  I dragged the sheet from the bed and ran cold water over the spot. He had to stand in the corner of the room as if he’d done something bad. “No, lie down,” I told him. “We don’t need a sheet every minute, do we?”

  He lay back down on the bare mattress on which one more stain wouldn’t be noticed. “Does that mean we’re over for a while,” he asked.

  “What for? I don’t care, as long as we don’t send them down a lot of bloody bedding—that would be a little embarrassing, I guess.”

  “You really don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know. Should I mind?”

  I wet the towel and left the sheet there in the sink while I went to the bed and wiped him off.

  “You’re gentle.” And we kissed.

  He was thinking about something and looking at the bloody towel.

  “My wife . . .”

  “Oh, no. Don’t start,” I pleaded with him.

  “No,” he insisted, “it’s nothing, it’s just that my wife, I was thinking, won’t ever make love to me during her time. It isn’t her way. That’s all. I find it very—well,” he decided, “I’m glad you let me, it's delightful.”

  “Good. Good.”

  He was different. He was quiet. He was thinking about his wife.

  “SHE'S HALF German. She works for a solicitor’s on High Holbom—a scrawny little suite of offices, everybody there appears very sad, if you ask me. She translates for them. I really don't know what she gets out of it. Her colleagues seem to . . . It’s not as if we need the money she makes. Or actually I suppose the case is we need a great deal more than that. I honestly don’t understand why she puts herself to the trouble. I’m afraid she's having an affair. And the children, you see, being raised by one sort of—retarded Scandinavian governess after another, teenaged. Or Irish, I remember we had one of those. Three years ago—or four, four years ago now, in fact—she had an affair with one of the men she worked with in a publicist’s firm. We very nearly . . . But I believe, I believe that we've . . .

  “The children,” he said, “are five and eight . . .”

  THEN IN the occasional fluorescent light one day I suddenly took sick. The toilet bowl became the center of my world.

  I’d had it more than once up north in Matagalpa, the leftist nation equivalent of turista, called I suppose engagista. But it was a little different every time you got it, and who knew? Maybe this time it was really something speedy and fatal . . .

  Naturally while the symptoms multiplied and elaborated on themselves, I was scared to death. There were intestinal things with the equatorial intensity of piranha-fish and killer bees, I might have one of those. I'd heard of a disease called leishmaniasis that I did not want to get . . . The diarrhea might have been that of snail fever, the stuffy head resembled meningitis . . . This enumeraton was cut short by complete delirium: Nothing was purple anymore . . . The walls turned a deep green-yellow . . . Everything was furry, in each object I looked at I detected a lurking metamorphosis. I was reduced to a passage, a tunnel, nothing else—we’re always turning up at weddings and seminars, looking in the papers for a better job, forgetting entirely how like a hollow rope, an elementary worm, is our basic physical design . . . That worm tried to turn itself inside out, and then I was treated to what an irrelevant and unnoticed lot of tits on a boar the rest of me can become, all the attachments that seem more real than the simple devouring and emitting thing I really am. The horrible smell—the Englishman disappeared into his own region of the building; had I strength to waste I’d have felt embarrassed.

  I reassured him whenever he came around to comfort me. By the time he went looking for help I was feeling the episode pass. As I say, I lived in the bathroom, where everything seemed to be gelatinously quivering, by now because of my exhaustion and not from delirium. I looked up in the flickering light and thought I made out the silhouette of my landlord standing in the doorway with the Englishman.

  “I need a doctor,” I said.

  “Ha! Ha!”—meaning we’d already covered that one.

  “Can’t you help her?” the Brit asked. “She needs a doctor.”

  Coughing and clearing his throat at the same time, the landlord answered unintelligibly.

  “He needs one too, the poor, fat pimp,” I said.

  Then just as suddenly I got well. I woke the next morning and the world wasn’t yellow anymore but violet, beautiful, and fresh as if a gale had swept it clean. Belatedly Señor Landlord brought me a couple of small white pills and several big ones packaged in a strip of tin foil. I ate them all at once, and they didn’t come back up, or rush along through.

  Inside of seventy-two hours I’d starved down to a saintly, X-ray translucence. When I looked in the mirror I saw the black lips and gums of a smiling dog.

  For two days I took no nourishment but Fanta colas . . . I drank them and walked all over downstairs, where there were clean wet sheets hanging in the high-ceilinged halls and sweetening the atmosphere pitifully with an odor of soap. The light from above fell through the vents in the eaves and struck these sheets in such a way that they absorbed the unrelieved purple of the hallway and gave it back as benevolence . . . Hanging there, curtain after curtain, turning the hallways into a series of wet, lilac rooms—I’d never seen anything so rapt, so holy and so frail, so completely terrifying . . . To think that in the center of a boiling sea of sweat, this teardrop cowered in its purity . . . Beauty, especially the angelic beauty of bedding being de-stained between fucks, is the most frightening business going in Inferno ’84.

  Except for clean sheets, this was a rough time. We still had a couple of days to wait through anxiously for our car. Days in which the press of realities emptied our honeymoon of its occult power.

  I myself was in real trouble, that was one of the realities. I occasionally took ti
me to appreciate that the Department of Defense was after me to lift my passport, thanks to my having been struck by altruism like lightning. And the Englishman never mentioned the life he’d placed in limbo by his half-assed benevolence, but sometimes, when I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it, he wore a secret face bottomless with losses.

  As the time came to leave, the lurking details snatched at us, the decisions we hadn’t made—in the first place, which border would we cross? North or south?

  “Not north,” I insisted, “the roads are bad, and also that’s where the war is. The administration is completely informal up there. I saw how they do justice up there—right by one of the main roads in Matagalpa, about three hundred yards from my cute little house.”

  “Matagalpa . . .”

  “I saw somebody strung up.”

  “Strung up, you say.”

  “Yeah. They hung him—a Contra. Suspected Contra.”

  “You don’t mean to say they hanged him?”

  “They hung him or they hanged him, either way he shit his pants and died.”

  He was stunned. “Oh, what an ugly thing to say.”

  I supposed he was right. “Fuck you,” I said.

  WE DECIDED on the southern border, which was closer anyway and made more sense, as far as gasoline was concerned—but we didn’t think about gasoline. We didn’t think about anything practical.

  Questions hovered and were never asked. Why head for Costa Rica when one of us was wanted in that country? Why not find a lawyer, or write a letter to the Times, or what about the Brit putting a call through to somebody he could trust at Watts Oil in London, or contacting a relative, even his wife?

  These were considerations that turned up in the vicinity of our desperate little chats, but we never considered them.

  I don’t know about his, but my mind wouldn’t think, it would only lift up horrible possibilities and shake each one at me like a club. Act! Run! Hide! Later you can be rational! We had problems here we couldn’t cope with. Don’t you get it? We didn’t know where to begin! We had to erase ourselves from this map and pop up in the middle of another one like tunnelling rodents.

  Still the car wasn’t ready . . .

  AND STILL we had those moments. I remember in particular calling out to him the last time we made love in our little room something like, “Cover me, oh, keep me covered . . .” One of those moments when it seems like something’s going to work . . .

  THE CAR was ready.

  TWO

  I’M STANDING out back of the Nicaraguan town of Masaya. A volcano sends up a cloud of steam in the distance . . .

  Far off there’s a black storm, full of lightning. Overhead it’s clear. Two stars are already visible.

  Looking out over the dusk-covered earthquake craters while the storm descends I think of another of William Something Merwin’s lines: The lightning has shown me the scars of the future . . .

  This was the end of our first day travelling. We’d turned off the highway, and while the Englishman went to Masaya’s open-air mercado looking for God knows what, I wasted time.

  Behind some kind of cultural center characterized mainly by stillness and an air of neglect, I leaned on a rock wall overlooking a volcanic lake and talked with a lady from a tour bus. I’d noticed her only last week at the equally deadly cultural center in Managua; she happened to be one of a group of musicians from Madison, Wisconsin, getting a taste of Third World socialism. Getting a bellyful. Like so many of us who’d descended into this region, she was a small bit horrified . . . What, no hot water, and I have to wipe my bum with words? . . . We looked at Nicaragua stretching out toward wherever it went, the Pacific Ocean was a good bet. Whatever was going on down here, it was none of our business. Only she couldn’t admit it yet. Two minutes after our conversation I forgot what we’d said . . . The volcano spoke unmistakably. Everything else was a lie.

  Wait a minute, it’s coming back to me, she described herself as a player of the bass viola if I have it right, and we watched the moon go from an amber blob to a strong pearlescent light, along the lines of a smashed egg reassembling itself.

  “I don’t know. We’re going to visit Jinotepe next,” she said.

  “I’ve been to Jinotepe. I think it has a lot of brick streets. But I can’t remember,” I said. “Where do you stay?”

  “We stay at these little kind of like hostels.”

  The yellow moon came out from behind the volcano, travelling sideways fast, and surprised us. You had to go forty miles outside of Managua to find anything to see, but the effort paid.

  “And what about your bass viola?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “what do you mean, exactly?”

  The moon’s face was just like the Englishman’s. That’s what I liked about him—his face was the moon’s, I’d been seeing his face all my life, soft and not yet final.

  “Well, do you carry it around with you? Are you guys giving concerts, I mean.”

  “No,” she said, “no.”

  Her companions were getting on the tour bus—it was one of the modern ones having plenty of room and very small wheels.

  “Well. . . There they are,” she said.

  “I wonder where my friend is? I’ve been waiting an hour.”

  “Are you with someone?”

  I didn’t like her asking questions. I didn’t like anyone asking questions.

  The fat-faced moon. The moon whose bow tie we can never see. The market should have been closed by now.

  “Well,” she cried, “I think that’s a terrible remark to make!”

  What had I said? Ah, something or other probably.

  Then—was it him? He stood at the edge of the parking lot in a suit exactly the color of the dusk. You couldn’t say for certain that he was real. He didn’t come near. I didn’t imagine it then, but probably he was already dead.

  THE VOLKSWAGEN’S air-conditioner puffed out a fiery stink. We travelled with the windows down, serenaded by the psycho humming of the tires, which were retreads from some socialist workers’ paradise across the sea. When we got up a little speed the wind thudded around our heads—and the temperature stayed right up there, but it wasn’t as sticky.

  Women idling on one leg, like storks, with the sole of one bare foot clamped against the other knee, stood looking up and down the highway . . . As in every region, rivers with the names of animals, streets with human names, places eternally irrelevant, landscapes as innocent as water in cupped hands. Billboards swung by trying to tell us things—No Pasaran—FSLN—red hammer and scythe over the Communist Party’s initials, MAP-ML—CASTROL GX—ALTO—and on the poles and walls were posted various exhortations and explanations (“There are no replacements because everything must go to the defense of our country”—et cetera, I forget the rest) . . . Desperate surviving made comprehensible through torn slogans . . .

  Pulling to the side of the road we would survey the scene and check out the roadside pedestrians, looking for the face that might have half a brain behind it. And then we’d ask our questions. I’ve experienced starvation and thirst, but never the drained, aching need for information, anything, the smallest piece of data—left or right? near or far? open or closed? is there a garage? a constabulary outpost? a meal? a drink? what time? how far?—that powered our movement along the edges of those towns. I got so that I trusted most the mean-looking jungle farmers trudging along by the road with their straw cowboy hats and machetes and hard brown flat bare feet like shapeless boots; but they were just as dumb as the others, completely in the dark as to what I was asking but not in the least reluctant to dish up an answer, giving me directions to places that will never exist, in colloquial phrases complicated by something they always seemed to be chewing, or sucking, and contradicted by their sign-language: a mix of rabbit-punches-in-reverse and caresses enacted on the air.

  But don’t think we covered a lot of ground on this trip—the entire ride happened on a hundred-mile stretch of the Panamerican Highway and s
ome of its tributaries. The reason it took five days was that we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know whether the border represented escape or danger, and so we dawdled in towns like Masaya and Rivas—the latter only twenty miles or so from the border—hoping to learn how to get across.

  Rivas was set up just like Masaya and most other towns in Central America . . . The streets emanated from a courtyard and a tall cathedral raised by Indians under the lash of zealous padres many centuries ago, before the Indians acquired uniforms and automatic rifles. The farther you got from the central church square, the more haphazard grew the system of Moorish lanes, until you were likely to wander the rest of your life among high walls spangled with bullet-holes if you didn’t have a map.

  But Rivas’s geography was simple enough. On one side of town was the highway, on the other a couple of red earthen roads that toddled a tiny distance toward the horizon before being pounced on and eaten by the jungle.

  Except for the fact that I was born without any sense, I might have lived there in Rivas forever. In the first place, we found a motel in that town that accepted my cordobas—a nice motel, with toilet paper, soap, showers, small blue electric fan on the bedside table, a bar full of rum and a restaurant that served chicken and fresh cow’s milk. On top of that, there weren’t any police or Department of Defense people around. Soldiers staffed the local FSLN headquarters, but they weren’t after anyone, they only liked to sit out front under the crimson-over-black slashes of the FSLN banner waiting for a capitalist revolution. The rural south of Nicaragua, if you asked me, was altogether genteel.

  We woke up in the morning with the blue fan cooling us—because now the Englishman and I slept together always, trying not to touch because of the heat, but wanting to be near—and I thought to hell with it, this is absolutely the last motel, the last wadded Kleenex, the final ashtray. Let’s just die here.